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We have some idea based on the 4e years and though it's not bad at all by normal sane person standards it's untenable by Hasbro standards.
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Jun 21, 2017 03:02
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Helical Nightmares posted:It's like they are begging a third party (Pazio) to take over the D&D niche. in a way they kind of already did that when they decided to go for the 3.x diehard crowd after they'd had all of 4e's lifespan to commit themselves to pathfinder
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Jun 21, 2017 03:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:Didn't they say from the beginning that there wasn't going to be a lot of official support for 5e? kind of incredible that they've been trying to push this as a good thing, and have at least been marginally successful at marketing it that way
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Jun 21, 2017 03:11
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They don't have any particular reason to care about the D&D niche, there's little money there. It's more lucrative as a license. MtG is about half of the collectible games market all by itself.
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Jun 21, 2017 03:22
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So ... this means no Eberron, no Dark Sun, et al. doesn't it. drat. How open is the 4ed and 5ed licence for 3rd party stuff? Brother Entropy posted:in a way they kind of already did that when they decided to go for the 3.x diehard crowd after they'd had all of 4e's lifespan to commit themselves to pathfinder Sort of amazing to me. The only thing Pathfinder has to do to be dominant is actually...just publish. Anything. rumble in the bunghole posted:Nobody's really got any idea about D&D's specific sales figures. I can see it being successful based on being a good time for it in the zeitgeist though. This is what also blows my mind. With the number of youtubers and podcasts who play 5ed D&D you think it would be easy to capitalize off this with low page number supplements like adventures, but no D&D just doesn't seem to care. Clearly I have a really uninformed view of the business though.
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Jun 21, 2017 04:03
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D&D is the end all be all of tabletop to a lot of people, so inertia does its job.
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Jun 21, 2017 04:15
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I got to introduce a customer looking for Pathfinder stuff to One Ring, FATE, and Mouse Guard today. He left with the FAE book in hand. I'm doing my part.
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Jun 21, 2017 04:23
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Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if for 6e WOTC just licenses it out to another company
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Jun 21, 2017 05:06
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drrockso20 posted:Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if for 6e WOTC just licenses it out to another company Who's lining up to pitch for it? James Raggi? ?
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Jun 21, 2017 05:11
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S.J. posted:I got to introduce a customer looking for Pathfinder stuff to One Ring, FATE, and Mouse Guard today. He left with the FAE book in hand. Jokes on him that's free to download
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Jun 21, 2017 05:20
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rumble in the bunghole posted:Jokes on him that's free to download Jokes on him for going out of his way to support his LGS with a 5 dollar purchase, indeed.
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Jun 21, 2017 05:26
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starkebn posted:Who's lining up to pitch for it? James Raggi? ? Kevin Siembieda 
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Jun 21, 2017 05:28
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I'll do it, I'll rewrite D&D, give me a call Wizards.
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Jun 21, 2017 05:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:Kevin Siembieda Wait until you see the missile rules for Magic Missile!
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Jun 21, 2017 05:31
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I know how it happened, but how the gently caress did Pathfinder happen?
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Jun 21, 2017 05:32
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starkebn posted:I know how it happened, but how the gently caress did Pathfinder happen? well you see, it all starts with a man named ryan dancey...
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Jun 21, 2017 05:34
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Red Metal posted:well you see, it all starts with a man named ryan dancey... a top idea guy that guy
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Jun 21, 2017 05:53
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would be pretty amazing to see them outsource d&d to some outside designer - has anyone tried making d&d as an independent developer before?
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Jun 21, 2017 05:59
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Impermanent posted:would be pretty amazing to see them outsource d&d to some outside designer - has anyone tried making d&d as an independent developer before? besides the original creation of d&d in the first place, I submit to you the entire history of tabletop RPGs
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Jun 21, 2017 06:03
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drrockso20 posted:Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if for 6e WOTC just licenses it out to another company kingcom posted:Most successful D&D ever is a really nonsense claim when nothing is coming out the pipeline and the team is tiny. They're not even trying to pump out other material to capitalise on it.
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Jun 21, 2017 06:35
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drrockso20 posted:Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if for 6e WOTC just licenses it out to another company Finally, Paizo can be whole again.
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Jun 21, 2017 06:50
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Helical Nightmares posted:This is what also blows my mind. With the number of youtubers and podcasts who play 5ed D&D you think it would be easy to capitalize off this with low page number supplements like adventures, but no D&D just doesn't seem to care. By limiting all the character options to just what's in the single PHB that they're ever going to release, they can keep the game simple and easy to run! It's a good thing that 5e's release schedule is so anemic, because you wouldn't want a Malconvoker/Swiftblade/Psychic Warrior at your table, would you? starkebn posted:I know how it happened, but how the gently caress did Pathfinder happen? This left Paizo without a game to publish for, save getting locked-in to taking a chance on however successful 4e might or might not be. They needed a game with a license that they could control directly, so they took D&D 3e, sheared off the serial numbers and published it as its own game (and came up with their own Pathfinder License). Of course, they wouldn't be the first people to try and publish their own 3e-derivative: lots of people tried that during the d20-era. They also had to launch a marketing campaign denigrating 4e as "too videogamey" and "not D&D", and heralding Pathfinder as the real deal. Ryan Dancey was one of the first people to really adopt the talking point alleging that WOTC saw the writing on the wall when it came to World of Warcraft and intentionally made 4e like that in an attempt to win over a newer, younger playerbase that was raised on MMOs. Except of course, this was considered a bad thing. It didn't help that WOTC's own marketing for 4e was "look at all the stuff that didn't really work well with 3e, that we are fixing now!". I mean, it was true, and 4e really was an iteration and clean-up of a lot of 3e's design, but to some people (with the help of Paizo), it felt like WOTC was bagging on a game that they were currently playing and that they currently enjoyed. People maybe didn't appreciate being told that their on-going campaign was "doing it wrong", so to speak. And yet another factor was that WOTC didn't bother to provide conversions or compatibility for the 3e-to-4e transition. Again, this sort of thing never works (the AD&D 2e-to-3e conversion document recommended that Fighter/Mages split their levels right down the middle, which was loving awful), but the lip service was appreciated. Especially when juxtaposed against Paizo telling you that with their Pathfinder game, you can continue to play all the characters you currently have, in the campaign you currently have! The final nail in the coffin was Mike Mearls getting handed the reins of 4e and immediately deciding to go full grognard and use Essentials to try and turn 4e into as close to 3e as was possible. Randomly rolled treasure, locked-in class progression, no Warlords, no Daily powers for martials, you name it. It turned off people who already liked 4e for what it was, and it didn't win over anyone new - anyone who was still playing 3e would have just jumped over to Pathfinder anyway. And then we get 5e, which is still so derivative of 3e (again!) that the rules would fit right in to a d20-licensed corebook found in a bookshelf in the early 00s, next to FantasyCraft and True20.
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Jun 21, 2017 07:17
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gradenko_2000 posted:Too many classes, too many items, too many feats So if 4E was WoW, what's the inevitable 6th edition gonna be based on? Overwatch? League of Legends? Pokemon Go?
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Jun 21, 2017 08:21
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My Lovely Horse posted:So if 4E was WoW, what's the inevitable 6th edition gonna be based on? Overwatch? League of Legends? Pokemon Go? Pathfinder
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Jun 21, 2017 08:23
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My Lovely Horse posted:I've gotta say though, that isn't entirely inaccurate, even before Essentials for 4E. There is such a thing as swinging too far in the opposite direction but I'd rather have few well-designed options than a ton of so-so ones (I'm aware that "well-designed" is the sticking point). I don't really disagree with you either, but Essentials didn't fix that, and even with 5e slow drip-drip-drip of Unearthed Arcana articles were still seeing waaaaay too character options being created. WOTC can always claim "the UA articles don't count as supplement bloat because they're unofficial", but ... it's out there, which means people will want to use it eventually, and if "my table says Corebook only" was enough of an rebuttal, then this shouldn't have been considered a problem in the first place. My main quibble with this is that the "few well-designed options" are a casualty of the small content offerings. Some of the best, most innovative designs in 3e came out in supplements, late in that edition's life-cycle. Psionics, Dungeonscape, Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, Complete Arcane, Miniatures Handbook were maybe not uniformly good, but at least they tried, and a Warmage, Factotum, Psion/Sangehirn, Crusader party is way more balanced than the classic Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard.
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Jun 21, 2017 08:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't really disagree with you either, but Essentials didn't fix that, and even with 5e slow drip-drip-drip of Unearthed Arcana articles were still seeing waaaaay too character options being created. WOTC can always claim "the UA articles don't count as supplement bloat because they're unofficial", but ... it's out there, which means people will want to use it eventually, and if "my table says Corebook only" was enough of an rebuttal, then this shouldn't have been considered a problem in the first place. Exactly. With a fair number of the options inside the actual 5e core book also being badly-designed, the freeze on official content means that things get stale really quickly. I know you can still vary up how characters play, but it gets a bit silly when every character has to be designed around a reason for having the same set of abilities as that class did in the last campaign. And, wow, selling someone FAE instead of Pathfinder was bold, but I'd like to see how their game would go. D&D's ultimately popular because it's easy to run, while FATE and FAE tend to leave the GM floundering (just look at the arguments about how to represent "being on fire")..
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Jun 21, 2017 11:53
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hyphz posted:Exactly. With a fair number of the options inside the actual 5e core book also being badly-designed, the freeze on official content means that things get stale really quickly. I know you can still vary up how characters play, but it gets a bit silly when every character has to be designed around a reason for having the same set of abilities as that class did in the last campaign. Agreed, I honestly can't comprehend how FATE and other similar ultra light "story" based games got so popular, but then when I say can't comprehend, I mean I literally cannot wrap my brain around how such systems work, my brain just zones out whenever I try, it's just too abstract(I think it might have something to do with how my brain is wired from my Autism) Admittedly I have similar issues with heavily mechanically complex systems due to a combination of my absolutely abysmal math skills(like I barely passed algebra in High School and that was after taking it twice, and these days I've atrophied in that regard so badly that anything beyond very simple addition or subtraction is impossible for me to deal with without a calculator), and my ADD/ADHD making it hard for me to concentrate on reading a system enough to be able to actually run it I'll admit I just made myself depressed by laying that all out, kinda highlights my failures as a human being mentally
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Jun 21, 2017 12:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:My main quibble with this is that the "few well-designed options" are a casualty of the small content offerings. Some of the best, most innovative designs in 3e came out in supplements, late in that edition's life-cycle. Psionics, Dungeonscape, Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, Complete Arcane, Miniatures Handbook were maybe not uniformly good, but at least they tried, and a Warmage, Factotum, Psion/Sangehirn, Crusader party is way more balanced than the classic Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard. I'll agree with you that the more interesting experiments in class design came in later 3e but what's the logic with putting the Complete Arcane and Miniatures Handbook in your list of best/innovative things there? The Miniatures Handbook is from 2003 and the only really useful classes you could pull from it were the Favored Soul or Warmage if you wanted to hard nerf the Cleric or Wizard. Marshal was... an attempt at... something I guess? The Healer was by far the least interesting, innovative, or even useful caster class in 3e. Sure, the Truenamer became basically unable to cast spells after a point, but at least it was an attempt at something new. Complete Arcane came out in 2004 is just an expanded 3.5e update of Tome and Blood. I guess they reprinted the Warmage in there and introduced the Warlock?
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Jun 21, 2017 12:20
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it seems like the supplement treadmill is one of the few ways to make a consistent profit on a tabletop rpg. like if you're not publishing books, running kickstarters for more books, or publishing other games i don't see how you're gonna stay in business.
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Jun 21, 2017 12:23
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'll agree with you that the more interesting experiments in class design came in later 3e but what's the logic with putting the Complete Arcane and Miniatures Handbook in your list of best/innovative things there? The Miniatures Handbook is from 2003 and the only really useful classes you could pull from it were the Favored Soul or Warmage if you wanted to hard nerf the Cleric or Wizard. Marshal was... an attempt at... something I guess? The Healer was by far the least interesting, innovative, or even useful caster class in 3e. Sure, the Truenamer became basically unable to cast spells after a point, but at least it was an attempt at something new. Complete Arcane came out in 2004 is just an expanded 3.5e update of Tome and Blood. I guess they reprinted the Warmage in there and introduced the Warlock? 1. Hard-nerfing the Cleric and Wizard is ... good? I mean this is 3e we're talking about 2. The Marshal lead directly to the Warlord, or at least if designer notes are to be believed 3. The Warlock is cool and good - not only was it ported into 4e, it survived that and made it to 5e, as a Core class both times
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Jun 21, 2017 12:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:1. Hard-nerfing the Cleric and Wizard is ... good? I mean this is 3e we're talking about Nerfing the cleric and wizard are good, but the classes themselves aren't really innovative outside of 3.5 casters in general having much more limited spell pools. I could see the line from the Marshal to the Warlord, but giving the Miniatures Handbook credit for having one flat attempt at a leader class is a bit much. And don't get me wrong, I like the Warlock class and it was funny how outraged a lot of nerds got at it, but it also feels like giving Complete Arcane too much credit when the other classes in the book were a reprint of Warmage and the Wu-Jen (*extended fart noise*). We can also fault Complete Arcane for filling out a large selection of staple wizard spells and metamagic feats.
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Jun 21, 2017 12:43
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Nuns with Guns posted:Nerfing the cleric and wizard are good, but the classes themselves aren't really innovative outside of 3.5 casters in general having much more limited spell pools. I could see the line from the Marshal to the Warlord, but giving the Miniatures Handbook credit for having one flat attempt at a leader class is a bit much. And don't get me wrong, I like the Warlock class and it was funny how outraged a lot of nerds got at it, but it also feels like giving Complete Arcane too much credit when the other classes in the book were a reprint of Warmage and the Wu-Jen (*extended fart noise*). We can also fault Complete Arcane for filling out a large selection of staple wizard spells and metamagic feats.  gradenko_2000 posted:My main quibble with this is that the "few well-designed options" are a casualty of the small content offerings. Some of the best, most innovative designs in 3e came out in supplements, late in that edition's life-cycle. Psionics, Dungeonscape, Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, Complete Arcane, Miniatures Handbook were maybe not uniformly good, but at least they tried, and a Warmage, Factotum, Psion/Sangehirn, Crusader party is way more balanced than the classic Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard.
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Jun 21, 2017 12:51
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drrockso20 posted:Agreed, I honestly can't comprehend how FATE and other similar ultra light "story" based games got so popular, but then when I say can't comprehend, I mean I literally cannot wrap my brain around how such systems work, my brain just zones out whenever I try, it's just too abstract(I think it might have something to do with how my brain is wired from my Autism) They work in a situation where there's a strong tacit agreement between the players and GM. They have problems otherwise. I mean, I did notice that D&D recently did a series of streamed games (Stream of Annihilation) which were presumably meant to show off how great 5e is, but actually to anyone who knows the system showed off how bad it is because of the number of times rules had to be ignored or fudged. Likewise with the comedy goon-involved podcast Dragon Friends which is meant to be about a group of newbies playing D&D, except the GM has to frequently dodge the D&D rules in order to keep things interesting, most obviously drastically cutting monster HP.
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Jun 21, 2017 12:54
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I'm objecting to crediting the whole of Complete Arcane and the Miniatures handbook as innovative. Also I wouldn't call 2003 or 2004 late in the development cycle of 3e if we're getting nitpicky enough to start bolding quotes I already read, but then the Expanded Psionics Handbook would get discounted on that end I suppose.
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Jun 21, 2017 12:56
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hyphz posted:Likewise with the comedy goon-involved podcast Dragon Friends which is meant to be about a group of newbies playing D&D, except the GM has to frequently dodge the D&D rules in order to keep things interesting, most obviously drastically cutting monster HP. And how by the end of their first campaign, The Adventure Zone is using a bare skeleton of 5e and are actually probably going to switch to a PbtA for their next one.
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Jun 21, 2017 13:07
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'm objecting to crediting the whole of Complete Arcane and the Miniatures handbook as innovative. Also I wouldn't call 2003 or 2004 late in the development cycle of 3e if we're getting nitpicky enough to start bolding quotes I already read, but then the Expanded Psionics Handbook would get discounted on that end I suppose. I read gradenko's post and thought to myself, "y'know, someone will read this, and take it to mean that all of those sourcebooks were completely good," and it just so happened that you are that someone. So while I get that you read that post already, I'm saying your takeaway from it was different from mine, and therefore wrong  Like I think dude's actually agreeing with you, and you're just talking past him.
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Jun 21, 2017 13:11
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Waffleman_ posted:And how by the end of their first campaign, The Adventure Zone is using a bare skeleton of 5e and are actually probably going to switch to a PbtA for their next one. they're carrying on in a proud tradition of ignoring the boring and busted poo poo in D&D in favor of doing fun things
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Jun 21, 2017 13:14
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drrockso20 posted:Agreed, I honestly can't comprehend how FATE and other similar ultra light "story" based games got so popular, but then when I say can't comprehend, I mean I literally cannot wrap my brain around how such systems work, my brain just zones out whenever I try, it's just too abstract(I think it might have something to do with how my brain is wired from my Autism) It assumes "don't be a dick" and "don't take over the story" are things you can just say to people and they'll follow along, as opposed to more structured games where actual mechanics prevent you from being a dick (not really, not always) and actual mechanics prevent you from declaring yourself God Emperor and destroying the world on your say-so (also not really, also not always)
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Jun 21, 2017 13:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:It assumes "don't be a dick" and "don't take over the story" are things you can just say to people and they'll follow along, as opposed to more structured games where actual mechanics prevent you from being a dick (not really, not always) and actual mechanics prevent you from declaring yourself God Emperor and destroying the world on your say-so (also not really, also not always) It sounds much more reasonable put like that, but more importantly it assumes that the players will be OK with the GM fiating bad things onto their characters without the support of any rules or pre-provided text. There are plenty of groups that are not OK with that, even though a lot of roleplaying communities online seem to have a blind spot with regard to them. I believe that's why the "5e/PF with adventure modules" style has substantial coverage outside of those groups.
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Jun 21, 2017 13:24
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also the book of nine swords ruled and factotum is my favorite D&D class
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Jun 21, 2017 13:25
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